escape markdown (avoid namespace pollution)

Description

gitlab-flavoured markdown keeps adding new shortcuts to create terse, and easy to parse (for humans) textual representation with lots of cross-references. cool.

unfortunately this also means, that an ever growing number of special characters cannot be used for "normal" text anymore. this is especially true, for special characters that have a real-world usage that looks similar to the text-representation in GFM.

it also doesn't really help, that sometimes a reference will expand to a link (if the referenced item exists), and sometimes it stays "as is".

at the time of writing six (6!) characters (@#!$~%) are overloaded with special meaning (related to gitlab references), making them unusable for other things.

examples:

• #1 using a hash # followed by a number is often used to reference enumerations (in gitlab context this could mean enumerations within a given issue, rather than neighboring issues)

• ~5 the tilde ~ is a common abbreviation for approximately

• $10 prefixing a number with currency symbol is often used to denote amounts of money.

Proposal

it would be nice, if cross-references could be escaped easily.

e.g. i currently don't have a way to use "#1 (closed)" without making it either a link to issue#1 (and creating a back-reference there) or marking it as code (which has a distinct look and meaning).

even better than adding special characters to avoid creating gitlab references, would be have been a generic meta-escape character that starts a gitlab cross-reference. e.g. using #!5 (rather than !5) to reference MRs.

i don't see any obvious collision (currently #[^0-9] seems to be forbidden anyhow), but feel free to come up with something better.

Compatibility

obviously there might be compatibility issues with removing special meaning from a given character. but then, i guess you could keep the old behaviour for a while, documenting only the new behaviour (so it gets adopted), and allow the admin to convert all gitlab-references to the new scheme

References

github at least shares the PR and issue namespace, so you can use # to refer to either of them.

added ~874211 feature proposal markdown labels

I came across with the same problem.

I've tested it in a private repo. Here's my example:

Code:

Hello, this is a test issue for escaping markdown. The following code should result in a headline: `# My headline`.

# My Headline

however, following [CommonMark's Spec](http://spec.commonmark.org/0.15/#backslash-escapes) the following code shouldn't:  `\# No headline`

\# No Headline

... and it doesn't. But how about special issue, PR, etc. [referencing](https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/markdown.html#special-gitlab-references)? You can't escape those: `\#2` where 2 is an issue's id

\#2

this shouldn't be linked but it is.

---

According to the CommonMark's Spec and the general well-known way to escape characters in most programming languages I'd suggest to use a \ (backslash) as it already escapes all other markdown (see example).

I don't know how the checks are implemented but I guess there are regexp rules for this. So you only have to add negative lookbehind to the pattern.

moved to gitlab#7625

Hey!

GitLab is moving all development for both GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition into a single codebase. The current gitlab-ce repository will become a read-only mirror, without any proprietary code. All development is moved to the current gitlab-ee repository, which we will rename to just gitlab in the coming weeks. As part of this migration, issues will be moved to the current gitlab-ee project.

If you have any questions about all of this, please ask them in our dedicated FAQ issue.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/13855

You can also find more information here:

• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/13304
• https://about.gitlab.com/2019/08/23/a-single-codebase-for-gitlab-community-and-enterprise-edition/

Frequently Asked Questions

For an up to date list of questions and answers, please take a look at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/13855

What will we do with the repository names?

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/ will become https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab, and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce will become https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss.

Why rename gitlab-ce to gitlab-foss?

Using "gitlab" and "gitlab-ce" would be confusing, so we decided to rename gitlab-ce to gitlab-foss to make the purpose of this FOSS repository more clear

I created a merge requests for CE, and this got closed. What do I need to do?

You will need to create a merge request at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/. This link will eventually redirect to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab.

How does the licensing work in this new setup?

Everything in the ee/ directory is proprietary. Everything else is free and open source software. If your merge request does not change anything in the ee/ directory, the process of contributing changes is the same as when using the gitlab-ce repository.

Will you accept merge requests on the gitlab-ce/gitlab-foss project after it has been renamed?

No. Merge requests submitted to this project will be closed automatically.

Will I still be able to view old issues and merge requests in gitlab-ce/gitlab-foss?

Yes.

How will this affect users of GitLab CE using Omnibus?

No changes will be necessary, as the packages built remain the same.

How will this affect users of GitLab CE that build from source?

Once the project has been renamed, you will need to change your Git remotes to use this new URL. GitLab will take care of redirecting Git operations so there is no hard deadline, but we recommend doing this as soon as the projects have been renamed.

Where can I see a timeline of the remaining steps?

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/13304

Will community contributions submitted to the new "gitlab" repository be available in the new gitlab-foss repository?

Yes, these changes will be synced to gitlab-foss automatically, several times per day.

locked this issue